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198
Dutch students create modular electric car "you can repair yourself" (www.dezeen.com)
submitted 4 days ago by Gsus4@mander.xyz to c/europe@feddit.org
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/40677034

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24122615

A team of students from the Eindhoven University of Technology has built a prototype electric car with a built-in toolbox and components that can be easily repaired or replaced without specialist knowledge.

The university's TU/ecomotive group, which focuses on developing concepts for future sustainable vehicles, describes its ARIA concept as "a modular electric city car that you can repair yourself".

ARIA, which stands for Anyone Repairs It Anywhere, is constructed using standardised components including a battery, body panels and internal electronic elements that can be easily removed and replaced if a fault occurs.

With assistance from an instruction manual and a diagnostics app that provides detailed information about the car's status, users should be able to carry out their own maintenance using only the tools in the car's built-in toolbox, the TU/ecomotive team claimed.

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[โ€“] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

But... this isn't a car. I'm going to be extremely negative here, but

It's a go-kart with big wheels and a metal car shell on top. It's so weird that they're claiming this is some kind of environmental achievement as a car when it isn't one. It's a really fun hobby project, to be sure though.

Things this "car" doesn't have:

  • headlights (it has soft-glow x-mas lamps glued on)
  • Indicators
  • Seatbelts
  • Seats that have more than 2cm of padding
  • Door locks
  • Door handles
  • Insulation and/or heating
  • Windows (the door and rear have plastic screens). That's why don't need any mechanisms to lift the doors, they're just single-sheet metal and plastic.
  • A properly secured front windscreen (seriously, it's got 2 clamps with 4 screws no wonder they barely used any glue, stuff is barely attached)
  • Windshield wipers
  • Literally any required safety feature.
  • Power steering, power braking. Obviously you don't need that for a go-kart, but you would if this were a real car.
  • Wheel arches (you can literally look through past the wheels, have fun scraping dirt out of that toolbox)
  • Literally any material at all between you and the frunk.
  • Any material between the wiring and the asphalt
  • Anything to prevent someone from quick-releasing those body panels and walking off with them.
  • Actually standardized body panels. Come on, there's no place you can get these things, especially not with the quick-release holes drilled in.
  • Come to think of it, it only seems to have one single quick-release bodypanel, on the front-left, the rest looks pretty firmly welded in place.

Add all those things, and you'll quickly discover your 650kg "car" has turned into a 1000 kg car sans batteries, and your 13kWh batteries are basically useless. You're going to need to swap those batteries pretty frequently anyway, since making them hand-swappable probably makes them impossible to climate-control and exposes them to wild temperature swings.

So yeah, this is a super fun hobby project, but it's on par with pretending my dad's old vespa is the future of motorcycles because you can maintain it at home.

[โ€“] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's a university built concept vehicle. Schools are unbound by things like

auto regulations

marketability

shareholder value

The point is to build something that looks like the auto of the future. You missed the message entirely.

[โ€“] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago

And if they said "Look at how pretty this mockup is" that would be fine. But instead they're saying thing "Look how eco-friendly it is, and how light, and how little glue was used so you can swap bits out". But those are all qualities that rely on this vehicle not actually being a car. If you apply any of this to a car, it stops being true.

The point is to build something that looks like the auto of the future

And all but one of my observations are about it NOT looking like a car, let alone a car of the future. I don't have any special insights, I just looked at the pictures.

The point is actually to do a really cool design project and score some free ECTS credits by having fun.